New Books In Biography

At the height of the Civil War, on May 12, 1862, Robert Smalls—an enslaved harbor pilot in Charleston, South Carolina—carried out one of the most courageous and cunning acts in American history. He disguised himself as a captain and, in the dead of night, commandeered the ship he worked on and sailed it to freedom. By the time Confederate soldiers realized what was happening, it was too late: Smalls, along with seven other enslaved crew members and their families, had run the blockade. Smalls’ heroism, and material aid for the Union, made national headlines and influenced Lincoln’s decision to accept Black soldiers into the Union Army. He later captained the very boat he took and, after the war, became a Congressman.DEFIANT: The Story of Robert Smalls (Stranger Comics, 2025) seeks to elevate Smalls to his rightful place in the national consciousness. The graphic novel—written by Rob Edwards (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Academy-Award nominated The Princess and the Frog) and drawn by comic book artists Niko

Ana Hebra Flaster was six years old when her working-class family was kicked out of their Havana barrio for opposing communism. Once devoted revolutionaries themselves but disillusioned by the Castro government’s repressive tactics, they fled to the US. The permanent losses they suffered—of home, country, and loved ones, all within forty-eight hours—haunted her multigenerational family as they reclaimed their lives and freedom in 1967 New Hampshire. There, they fed each other stories of their scrappy barrio—some of which Hebra Flaster has shared on All Things Considered—to resurrect their lost world and fortify themselves for a daunting task: building a new life in a foreign land.Weaving pivotal events in Cuba–US history with her viejos’—elders’—stories of surviving political upheaval, impossible choices, and “refugeedom,” Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town (She Writes Press, 2025) celebrates the indomitable spirit and wisdom of the women warriors who led the family o

Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds: Stories of Extinction (Reaktion, 2025) by Reverend Barbara Allen presents thirty-one extinct species through the personal perspectives of those animals. This intimate approach not only highlights each species but explores the broader implications of losing a species forever. How do we honour such a loss? Can we grieve for species we never knew? These animals range from the well-known passenger pigeon, thylacine and great auk, to lesser-known creatures like the Arabian ostrich, Saint Helena earwig and Bramble Cay melomys. These poignant portraits tug on the heartstrings and aim to inspire readers to protect vulnerable and endangered species today, motivating them to play a positive role in conserving our planet’s biodiversity. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

The Kims, of North Korea, are perhaps the 21st century’s most successful family dictatorship–if only due to sheer longevity, having run North Korea for the almost eight decades since the country’s post-war founding. Kim Il-Sung led North Korea for over half that time, from its founding in 1948 to Kim’s death in 1994. But who was Kim Il-Sung? How did someone who spent most of his early years in nearby Manchuria end up running North Korea? And how was Kim able to not just secure his own position, but also the position of his son (and then, in turn, his grandson)? Kim is the subject of Fyodor Tertitsky’s latest book, Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung (Hurst, 2025). Fyodor Tertitskiy has been living in South Korea for more than a decade, where he researches North Korean political, social and military history. He has authored several books in English and Korean, including Soviet-North Korean Relations During the Cold War (Routledge: 2024) and The North Korean Army: History, Structure, Daily Life (Routle

Even with the availability of new forms of storytelling, the memoir remains as one of the favored ways for combat veterans to tell their stories about war for a public eager to know. In American War Stories: Veteran-Writers and the Politics of Memoir (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021), Dr. Myra Mendible examines how combat veterans use the memoir to tell their stories of war and to engage in political conversations about war itself. Using memoirs by US veterans of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, Dr. Mendible shows how these "true fictions" can shape knowledge about war, how veteran-writers use the "politics of credibility," the aesthetics of war and silence, and the often-ignored political function of the war memoir. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

A beautiful and compelling family memoir retracing the love story between Sabrin Hasbun’s Palestinian father and Italian mother, and the life of her half-Italian, half-Palestinian family from the 1960s to 2020. After the loss of her mother, Sabrin tries to renegotiate her mixed identity and understand her mother’s choices which led her from an oppressive childhood in a village in Tuscany to finding love and community activism in Palestine. This is a story about overcoming grief and what it means to lose not only loved ones, but also a place in the world and a sense of belonging. Sabrin Hasbun was born in Palestine, spent her childhood in Palestine and Italy, and now lives in the UK. She holds a PHD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and lectures in Creative Writing at Cardiff Met University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

The Nazi threat emerges from Germany 1933 and shatters the small town life in Krasnik south of Lublin in eastern Poland. The teenager Mischa Stahlhammer manages to escape from a German work camp and joins Polish partisans. He survives by becoming a specialist in arming and disarming mines, the most dangerous of all missions. After the war he ends up in Sweden, meets Sonja, who also lost her family and youth in German concentration camps. Their son Semmy, born in Eskilstuna, tells the story of what a boy, his family and friends had to live through in Poland before, during and after the Second World War, and how love gives him back the will to live – and the strength to create a new life in a foreign land. Semmy Stahlhammer was First Concertmaster at the Stockholm Royal Opera and Ballet for 25 years, and Artistic Director of Chamber Music at Stockholm Grand Hotel, and of the music festival in San Giovanni in Tuscany, Italy. He is now leader of Stahlhammer Klezmer Classic. In his violin ateljé in Stockholm he

Often I will find in a chronology or a biography, you know, official materials, evidence that because I have other evidence, it’s meaningful in a way that maybe the people who edited those collections might not have expected. That’s the idea of mosaic theory – you bring together many pieces of evidence, even small ones, to bring the full meaning out. — Joseph Torigian, NBN interview May 2025 In his new book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (Stanford University Press, 2025), Joseph Torigian leads readers deep into the complex work of historical reconstruction – a process he metaphorically describes as mosaic theory. Studying elite politics in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Torigian explains, isn’t about uncovering one decisive document; it’s about piecing together partial, often contradictory fragments like the Li Rui diaries, edited speeches, and scattered archival traces into a fuller, richer picture. Torigian’s approach builds on foundational insights

In America's Cold Warrior, James Graham Wilson traces Paul Nitze's career path in national security after World War II, a time when many of his mentors and peers returned to civilian life. Serving in eight presidential administrations, Nitze commanded White House attention even when he was out of government, especially with his withering criticism of Jimmy Carter during Carter's presidency. While Nitze is perhaps best known for leading the formulation of NSC-68, which Harry Truman signed in 1950, Wilson contends that Nitze's most significant contribution to American peace and security came in the painstaking work done in the 1980s to negotiate successful treaties with the Soviets to reduce nuclear weapons while simultaneously deflecting skeptics surrounding Ronald Reagan. America's Cold Warrior connects Nitze's career and concerns about strategic vulnerability to the post-9/11 era and the challenges of the 2020s, where the United States finds itself locked in geopolitical competition with the People's Republi

It is indisputable that Marx began his intellectual trajectory as a philosopher, but it is often thought that he subsequently turned away from philosophy. In Karl Marx and the Actualization of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2025), Christoph Schuringa proposes a radically different reading of Marx's intellectual project and demonstrates that from his earliest writings his aim was the 'actualization' of philosophy. Marx, he argues, should be understood not as turning away from philosophy, but as seeking to make philosophy a practical force in the world. By analysing a series of texts from across Marx's output, Schuringa shows that Marx progressively overcame what he called 'self-sufficient philosophy', not in order to leave philosophy behind but to bring it into its own. This involves a major reinterpretation of Marx's relationship to his ancestors Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, and shows that philosophy, as it actualizes itself, far from being merely a body of philosophical doctrine, figures as an instrum

In Too Good to Get Married: The Life and Photographs of Miss Alice Austen (Fordham University Press, 2025) by Dr. Bonnie Yochelson, explore Gilded Age New York through the lens of Alice Austen, who captured the social rituals of New York’s leisured class and the bustling streets of the modern city. Celebrated as a queer artist, she was this and much more.Alice Austen (1866–1952) lived at Clear Comfort, her grandparent’s Victorian cottage on Staten Island, which is now a National Historic Landmark. As a teenager, she devoted herself to photography, recording what she called “the larky life” of tennis matches, yacht races, and lavish parties.When she was 25 and expected to marry, Austen used her camera to satirize gender norms by posing with her friends in their undergarments and in men’s clothes, “smoking” cigarettes, and feigning drunkenness. As she later remarked, she was “too good to get married.” Austen embraced the rebellious spirit of the “New Woman,” a moniker given to those who defied expectations by p

Historian Victoria Bynum turns now to her own history in this multigenerational American saga spanning from 1840 to 1979. Through meticulous historical research, personal letters, diaries, and the unpublished memoir of Mary Daniel Huckenpoehler, the author’s maternal grandmother, Bynum examines five generations within the broader context of the nation’s history, navigating pivotal events such as First Wave immigration, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Great Depression, two world wars, the Cold War, and beyond. Child of a mother from Waconia, Minnesota, and father from Jones County, Mississippi, Bynum blends a historian’s voice with personal experiences, intertwining her grandmother’s unpublished memoir and letters with her own role as a diarist and historian. She explores class, race, ethnicity, and gender dynamics. From the rise of Welsh immigrant ancestors in the Upper Midwest and the Gilded Age privileges of her grandmother’s upbringing to Bynum’s own tumultuous childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s as

With a compelling story, wit, insight, and candor, American author Stephen Huyler leads the reader into the heart of India. It is a country and culture he knows and loves well. Beginning with his arrival on his twentieth birthday, he spins tales of a young man's fascination that seasons into a rare relationship that has lasted half a century. Few foreigners have traveled as extensively in India as he. Huyler has learned to feel the pulse of the people. His innate adaptability has enabled him to be truly quiet, observing, accepting, and accepted by a remarkable range of individuals from maharajah to musician, Brahman to Dalit, and politician to potter. His memoirs are an evocation of an India rarely seen by outsiders: portraits of people, places, and customs. Transformed by India: A Life (Pippa Rann, 2025) combines humor with pathos, delight with dismay, sacred with secular, and tranquility with suspense. His narrative flows and unfolds seamlessly through a life transformed by India. Stephen P. Huyler is an a

In this NBN episode, host Hollay Ghadery speaks with author Gina Leola Woolsey about her stunning biography, Fifteen Thousand Pieces (Guernica Editions, 2023).  On Wednesday, September 2nd, 1998, an international flight carrying 229 souls crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia. There were no survivors. By Friday, Sept 4th, thousands of dismembered body parts had come through Dr. John Butt's makeshift morgue in Hangar B at the Shearwater military base. The Chief Medical Examiner faced the most challenging and grisly task of his career. Five years prior to the plane crash, John had lost his prestigious job as Alberta’s Chief Medical Examiner. After 14 years of marriage, John began to think of himself as gay, but remained closeted professionally. Then, after serving a handful of years as Nova Scotia's Chief Medical Examiner, the devastating crash in Nova Scotia cracked his carefully constructed façade. Fifteen Thousand Pieces explores one man's journey to accept his true nature and find hi

We have long lacked a biography of Erving Goffman. Partly this can be explained by Goffman’s direction for his papers not to be opened to researchers after his death. This meant those who may wish to write Goffman’s biography had a lack of material to draw upon. Dmirti Shalin, author of Erving Manuel Goffman: Biographical Sources of Sociological Imagination (2025, Routledge), has overcome this by developing the Erving Goffman Archives, a collection of correspondence, family histories, syllabi and reminisces which allows for this book to exist as the first true biography of the great scholar. In providing the details of Goffman’s life, Shalin has provided new ways of looking at Goffman, showing how factors like his upbringing in a family of Russian Jewish immigrants, his relationship with, and the sad suicide of, his wife, his interactions with colleagues and his everyday interactions shaped his sociology. Along the way we are encouraged to look anew at Goffman’s work on topics such as the presentation of self

The extraordinary life of forgotten World War II hero Evans Carlson, commander of America’s first special forces, secret confidant of FDR, and one of the most controversial officers in the history of the Marine Corps, who dedicated his life to bridging the cultural divide between the United States and China“He was a gutsy old man.” “A corker,” said another. “You couldn’t find anyone better.” They talked about him in hushed tones. “This Major Carlson,” wrote one of the officers in a letter home, “is one of the finest men I have ever known.”These were the words of the young Marines training to be among the first U.S. troops to enter the Second World War—and the Major Carlson they spoke of was Evans Carlson, a man of mythical status even before the war that would make him a military legend.By December of 1941, at the age of forty-five, Carlson had already faced off against Sandinistas in the jungles of Nicaragua and served multiple tours in China, where he embedded with Mao’s Communist forces during the Sino-Jap

Maureen Stanton’s new memoir, The Murmur of Everything Moving (Columbus State University 2025) opens when she was in her early twenties, working at a bar saving for a backpacking trip through Europe. She meets and falls for Steve, an electrician who at 27 is the father of three children going through a divorce. They are deeply in love, now back in Michigan close to Steve’s children, when he’s diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer that has metastasized throughout his body. In beautiful prose, Stanton describes the medical challenges, Steve’s physical and psychological pain, and the heartache they face knowing that his time is limited while trying to defy the odds. This is a moving story of human fragility, resilience, and the different forms love can take. Maureen Stanton is also the author of Body Leaping Backward: Memoir of a Delinquent Girlhood, winner of a Maine Literary Award and a People Magazine "Best Books Pick"; and Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and

My recent interview with Rabbi Dr. Yosie Levine about his book, Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi and the Battlegrounds of the Early Modern Rabbinate (Littman Library, 2024), illuminated the dynamic interplay between Sephardi and Ashkenazi traditions-a theme that resonates deeply with our mission at the Unity Through Diversity Institute. From the outset, Rabbi Levine’s scholarship made clear that Hakham Tsevi’s life was shaped by both geography and intellectual inheritance. The map at the beginning of his book, as he notes, is more than a visual aid; it is a testament to the diverse worlds Hakham Tsevi traversed. What struck me most was Hakham Tsevi’s dual heritage. Raised in the Ashkenazi tradition, his formative years were marked by the customs and halakhic frameworks of Central and Eastern Europe. However, his sojourn in the Ottoman Empire brought him into close contact with the Sephardi world. This was not a mere footnote in his biography; it fundamentally altered his worldview and rabbinic outlook. The mere fac

From 1949 until his death in 1997, Murray Kempton was a distinct presence in New York City journalism. Peddling around town on a three-speed bicycle wearing a three-piece suit, he wrote about everything from politics to jazz to the Mafia. His writing was eloquent, his perspective unique, and his moral judgements driven by a profound sympathy for losers, dissenters and underdogs. His best-known work was written for the New York Post, New York Newsday, and later the New York Review of Books. Kempton could find a good story in a criminal trial or a bureaucratic report, and he peppered his columns with references to history and literature to set stories in context. He enjoyed the respect of people as different as the conservative writer William F. Buckley and members of the Black Panther Party. Going Around: Selected Journalism / Murray Kempton (Seven Stories Press, 2025), edited by Andrew Holter, brings Kempton’s work to old admirers and a new generation of readers. The book includes a biographical introductio

Reform Judaism looks different today than it did a century ago. There are a lot of factors that lead to that change, but among these is Rabbi Alexander Schindler (1925-2000). Doing most of his work in the middle of the 20th century, Schindler was either part of or directly responsible for the changes in Reform (and even American) Judaism that we see today. In his biography of Rabbi Schindler, Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler (CCAR Press), Dr. Michael Meyer paints a picture of an extraordinarily influential leader in the history of Reform Judaism. From 1973 to 1996, he served as president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (today's Union for Reform Judaism), where his charisma and vision raised the Reform Movement to unprecedented influence. Never afraid to be controversial, he argued for recognizing patrilineal descent, institutionalized outreach to interfaith families and non-Jews, and championed LGBTQ rights and racial equality. He was a tireless advocate for Isra